Room 4's Assembly Presentation

Wild Self Challenge

One of our recent Friday Challenges involved using the website http://www.buildyourwildself.com/  to create a creature with special features. Children had to design their creature and explain why they picked the body parts they did. They then got into pairs and wrote a story together. The story had to include their 'wildself' and a problem that their creature could solve thanks to its special features.

Visit the individual blogs to see the wild creatures and the great story writing.  Here's the beginning of a couple of stories to whet your appetite......

Down in the forest where the flowers all bloomed, the trees all stood still as the animals watched the Fru Fru Olympics in the village of Fru Fru Trees . The wind whistled past as the sun beamed brightly on the athletes as they got ready to compete.....

This is the beginning of Isabel and Arnika's story.

Jordan and Liam's story starts like this....

Crawler and Jobro were strolling along a rocky mountain track where you could see the blue sky and the cityscape and it was beautiful until zap pow bang. They ended up running for their lives from a gigantic boulder that was pushed down by an evil goblin.

Room 4 Learning Stars - Our Treaty

Over the last term our class has changed quite a bit -  three children have left and four children have started! We decided it was time to review the Toko Learning Stars and what they mean in Room Four.

Toko School Learning Stars

Brainstorm of our Ideas

As a group we brainstormed all our ideas and decided we'd turn these ideas into a class treaty.



Everyone had different ideas around how we could display our treaty so the children  put themselves into groups and choose what programme or format they would like to use to create our class treaty.

Charlie and Oli decided to design a poster that included
a chicken since Rm 4 is the chicken class.

Courtney and Taitania made a book-creator on the Ipad, Jordan
and Mason made a puppet pals movie, while Brock and
Liam used Google Docs to create their treaty.

Judah and Thomas used the drawing programme
in Google Drive to create their treaty.

Mackenzie C and Isabel decided to create a poster. They drafted their ideas on paper and then used the computer to type them up and display them with color.

We decided that we would vote on the best one and use that as our class treaty. To be successful children needed to include: the words we'd brainstormed, bright colours, clear font or writing, be creative and make sure their product represented Room 4.

Here are the finished products

Pippa, Mackenzie W and Sophie's poster

Pascoe, Arnika and Renee's poster

Ephraim's Wordle 

Judah and Thomas' poster from Google Draw

Oli and Charlie's poster

Liam and Brock's Google Doc Poster

Emma and Aylah's Word Doc Poster

Isabel and Mackenzie C's Word Poster

Taitania and Courtney put their treaty together in book-creator

Jordan and Mason produced these two puppet pal videos that show being kind and not being kind.

Oli and Charlie's poster and Isabel and Mackenzie C's poster were voted the two finalists but in the end we decided to display all ten treaties and we signed all ten treaties. That means we now have ten different ways to remind ourselves what it looks like to be a Learning Star in Room 4! We have agreed to remind each other in a nice way if someone forgets our treaty agreement.

Fertile Eggs

Another batch of babies have gone into the incubator! Today we put 41 eggs in, so in 21 days we hope to have lots of new chickens to get to know! Keep watching our blog as the days go past because we'll be sharing the stages of development with you.....

Maths Conversations

Today we worked individually to try and solve a problem. Then we shared our ideas in small groups before coming together as a class. We are learning to have conversations that are relevant to the task. We have a set of cards with sentence starters on them and we are only allowed to use those words to ask questions or offer an opinion. Below are some of the cards we are using.

Here is the problem we worked through. The children were awesome at sticking to the sentence starters on the cards and it definitely made a difference as to how focused everyone was. We'll be using these cards a lot more in an effort to keep our maths talk appropriate and accountable. Some great learning took place. Ask your child to explain the problem to you and see if you can use some of the sentence starters to engage them in a conversation. 

Number Detective

Stage: 2 

Follow the clues to find the mystery number from the list below.

• The number has two digits.
• Both of the digits are even.
• The digit in the tens place is greater that the digit in the ones place.
• The ones digit is not in the three times table.
• The tens digit is not double the ones digit.
• The sum of the two digits is a multiple of five.

High Diving Giraffes

Today we viewed the beginning of a video clip that showed some very life-like giraffes making their way up a spiraling ramp inside a large tiled complex. As a group we collaborated and wrote the beginning of the story, written from the point of view of an imaginary security guard.  This is what we came up with.....

I was quietly going about my daily job as a security guard at the Palace of Pools swimming complex, when I heard an unusual clip-clopping sound. The sound become louder and louder and got closer and closer. The strange noise sounded like animal hooves, but I felt confused because animals clearly don’t go swimming! What on earth could it be?  

I turned towards the huge row of camera screens on the wall behind me. My eyes nearly popped out of my head like popcorn bursting out of the pot!  On the screen that showed the lower hallway, I saw not one, but several gigantic giraffes casually strolling along the corridor!!

I watched with amazement as these gentle giants made their way up the spiraling ramp. They paused for a moment at the top. I wondered what they were going to do next…..

After writing the beginning together, we went away and wrote our own endings. Some of us worked in pairs and some of us on our own. We had to predict what we thought might happen in the video and turn it into a story. If you keep an out on our individual blogs over the next few days you'll see what we wrote. At this stage we're editing, proof reading and giving each other feedback.

We watched the whole video when we'd finished our drafts. Here's the video for those of you that would like to see it......

Mindsets - Fixed or Growth??

Over the past few days we have begun talking about mindsets. According to a very knowledge and well known lady called Carol Dweck we all either have a fixed or growth mindset. The differences between the to are shown in the poster below.

Clearly we'd all like our children to have a growth mindset - to believe that even though they don't know how to do something 'yet', they can learn it.

We watched the video below and discussed the meaning and how it relates to us and our learning.

Somehow during the discussion, we got on to what the children would like to be when they grow up. This ended up being our writing task for the day! Check out your child's blog to see what they'd like to do when they leave school and to find out their ideas of growth and fixed mindsets. 

Below are also a couple of images that are now hanging in our room.